The Man in the Monster Read Online Free

her over onto her stomach and using the same pieces of cloth with which he had bound her, he strangled her and then stuffedher lifeless body, naked from the waist down, into the front seat of the car with the back of the front seat lowered.
    Michael’s version of what happened next differed depending on when he was telling the story. His confession says he took Leslie out of the trunk, then had her undress and “perform oral sex on me.” Michael claimed that “she was too small,” so he didn’t rape her. Instead, he apologized to her and then strangled her. He told Dr. Howard Zonana, a psychiatrist who examined him for the defense but did not testify in court, that “she was the only one who didn’t panic. They all fought me and resisted me. She didn’t.” He said that she “took the excitement out of it” and that he couldn’t get hard when he tried to rape her. “She never said a thing, not even when I was strangling her.”
    However, while on death row, he changed his story. “I tried to rape her vaginally,” he claimed, “but I couldn’t penetrate her. So I raped her anally.” He used the cloth ligatures to strangle her before putting her body back into the trunk of the car. He then looked for a place to hide the bodies, perhaps because the location of the murders was too close to the road and he wanted to make sure the bodies weren’t discovered right away; Michael couldn’t explain his reasons except that every time he realized what he had done, he panicked. He didn’t want to get caught, and the best way to avoid being accused of murder was to hide the bodies. He drove back to Connecticut, toward the place where he had picked up the girls, and disposed of their bodies in a culvert within miles of where they lived. Like a ritualistic wake, Michael returned to that location on several occasions but was always worried that the bodies would be found and “that someone would recognize my car as being in the area. But I had to return to check them. I don’t know why . . . I just had to see that they were still there. . . . I didn’t stay long,” he later told me.
    When he was arrested, Michael never went as far as saying that hehad killed Leslie to cover his crimes, but because he admitted apologizing to her, it seemed the most likely scenario to many people. He always said that Leslie Shelley’s murder bothered him the most. Was any scenario better than another? Either he killed Leslie without sex and therefore may have done it as part of a cover-up, or he tried to rape the poor little girl, couldn’t, and settled for anal sex, making Leslie’s death more agonizing. Either option was equally abhorrent. That’s why Ed and Lera Shelley were present at every hearing and were determined that Michael Ross should be executed.

3
CONNECTICUT
    1994
    At the
Law Tribune
, we held weekly editorial meetings in a conference room that overlooked a salt marsh. During a Monday morning meeting in early August 1994, I was staring out the window watching a blue heron lying in wait, standing motionless trying to be invisible to unsuspecting fish, as Joe Calve, the editor of the paper, gave a summary of the Connecticut Supreme Court’s opinion that upheld Michael Ross’s conviction of guilt but overturned his death sentences.
    Michael had been arrested in Connecticut in June 1984 after a three-year killing spree that began just before his graduation from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in May 1981. After his Connecticut arrest, he was charged with the rape and murder of six women. Tammy Williams, seventeen, and Debra Smith Taylor, twenty-three, were murdered in Windham County, Connecticut. Robin Stavinsky, nineteen, Leslie Shelley, fourteen, April Brunais, fourteen, and Wendy Baribeault, seventeen, were murdered in adjacent New London County. Later Michael admitted to raping and killing